


There are days

by imsfire



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: AU, Angst, Cassian-centric, Depression, Gen, Hope, Jyn is only briefly present, Mental Breakdown, Mental Health Issues, PTSD, Recovery, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Survival, Therapy, mention of self-harm, mentions of suicide and medication, starts pretty dark but this is a hopeful story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-12
Updated: 2017-07-12
Packaged: 2018-12-01 06:27:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11480583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imsfire/pseuds/imsfire
Summary: The sun brings fear with it, now.  It will never again be merely daylight, he thinks, detached even from his own desperation.  The sun is always that distant undying memory of dying.  It would have been better if he had died, then, on the beach, in the sunrise that was not, on Scarif.





	There are days

**Author's Note:**

> A follow-up to "A little more information", which was itself a follow-up to "On attachment elsewhere", so it would probably help to have read them before this.  
> Basically, the background is that in this AU Cassian has just barely held on till the end of the war and then snapped.

At first, he’s simply still alive.  But it is hardly living, at first.

It is darkness; and when there is light, it feels like a sword through the brain.

It is a morass, sucking like quicksand, and himself somehow still breathing, still moving in its grip.

It is pain, hunger and pain; whole days when he feels nothing else.  It is his wrists burning as though acid had soaked down into his skin when the blood lay crimson across it. 

The stitches have been taken out, the wounds he cut and tore into himself have healed up, the new skin very red, then fading, very pale.  The scar tissue has a strange silken tension in it, and a sheen.

There are days when the air itself seems muffled; as though a heavy fabric is pressing him down, weighing on his face, stifling him.  A shroud; and he’d tried to be ready for it, his shroud, the only thing he’s fit for after all.  Tried but failed.  When it lifts, he gasps for air.  The shroud is like night in the daytime.  Then the sun blinds him.

The sun brings fear with it, now.  It will never again be merely daylight, he thinks, detached even from his own desperation.  The sun is always that distant undying memory of dying.  It would have been better if he had died, then, on the beach, in the sunrise that was not, on Scarif.

**

He’s alive, and the people here seem determined for some reason to keep him so.  They lead him into a dining room three times a day and place proteins, salads, pieces of sliced fruit in front of him.  It breaks him inside to see such good things, and be barely able to taste them.  To see such kindness and be unable to merit it.  Others so much more deserving should have been given this bounty; should have been given life.

There are little cups of pills, with every meal, and a supervising eye to make sure he takes them.  There is a daily walk, escorted by a quiet droid; round the grounds, through a grove of flowering trees, along a path beside the lake.  They have told him already that the water is very shallow.  The droid mentions gravely that it would not let him try to swim even so.

There’s one more pill in the evening, just before the dimming of the light.  And then sleep, as deep and welcome as death would have been.

He’s too numb to care that it will never work.  Or to notice when it begins to.

**

He finds that he cannot say when it was that the daylight first seemed simply like light again, and no longer like a torture to him.  There was no single moment of realisation.  He’d always supposed there would be, if in the end such a thing could still be possible.  But it came so quietly that he never felt the change.  He’s been eating his food and taking his pills, walking round the grounds as instructed, sleeping when the lights went out.  A regular pattern of days, and it just _was_ , one day.  A beginning, that had arrived unnoticed. 

The pain like a fist clenching inside him, the constant gnawing hunger, is uncurling.  He wonders if he ought to panic, to know the drugs are working, as he was promised they would.  He feels calm, and that is almost terrifying.  He is no longer starved and smothered inside himself, is no longer bound and hanging on by that thin mental thread, that barest, most worn thread of the fabric of pain.  The fabric itself, that has veiled every moment and every interaction for so long, seems to have been lifted away. 

Not to be in pain.  It’s hard to remember when that was ever normal.  He goes on taking the medication, secretly disbelieving that this state can be anything more than a lull.  Pain has been the constant, the ongoing storm.  Surely everything that hurts will come for him again, soon.  The airlessness, the hunger inside, the thin taut thread binding, choking, tightening.  He has no right after all to be here, no right to see the clouds at midday or the plants on the terrace, or the kind faces of the nurses, the doctors, the therapists, the droids.  But they make him stay alive.

They make him take care; take his medication, turn up for his mandated therapy sessions, sit and talk.  He’s spent enough of his life acting under orders, obeying pointless directives, obeying even in the face of what made his soul rebel; faced with these latest commands he dredges up some further obedience from somewhere.  He talks.  He goes on taking the pills, the prescribed walks, the plain wholesome food.  It’s still beyond belief that there might be some hope; and then, very slowly, less so.  There is sunlight, still.  There is air.  He can breathe, feel the warmth, taste the air.

He begins to be able to see it.  The process of recovery is a strange thing for an observing mind to witness itself in.  He breathes and hears the sound without horror; sees the light and is glad of it.   Realises that sometimes, for whole minutes at a time, he is no longer fit only for a shroud.

There are days when he breaks and cries, and knows he’ll never be whole again; and there are days when he believes that he’ll wake and not fear the urge to death, know that pain is no longer stored, waiting, just out of sight.

**

There’s a day when he watches a bird in one of the trees; it flutters from branch to branch, hunting for and eating bugs in the bark, pausing from time to time to look around, quick and cautious, before returning to its endless feeding.  Then it reaches the top of the tree and suddenly it sits straight and throws its head back, and sings.  It is a sound so unexpected, an assertion of self and of life so sudden and vivid after the steady, furtive searching for food, the existence built on nothing but hunger, that Cassian laughs; and then cries in shock.

There’s a day when his talking therapy session comes round again and he sits and tells the doctor about the bird and the fear that he’ll never move past the pain, the years of hunger.  Talks of the desperation, the tight thread of sanity, constantly kept pulled to breaking stress; the knowing he was worthless if he needed anything, if he couldn’t hide every weakness, because all his world was the rebellion and all the rebellion needed was his strength. 

There’s a day he talks about how he met a woman who didn’t hide her need but lived illuminated by it, like a human torch.  About how she had driven and maddened and inspired him; and how much he misses her, how much he wishes he’d been able to be what she needed.

There are many more days. 

The light seems less sharp each morning now, broader and more welcoming, and it’s partly the turning of the seasons, and partly his own calm.  The sun rising is not a death coming for him, the act of going through his day no longer a mere repetition under orders.  There may be something this day that makes him stop and stand still, breathing, that makes him glad he is alive to hear it, or see it, to breathe with it, taste it in the air.

**

There’s the day he receives a visitor.  It’s hot, the sun of high summer burning down on the gardens round the asylum, but he wears his shirt sleeves buttoned close at the cuff, so that she doesn’t have to see the scars.  They walk through the grounds, along his usual route, and he tells her about the different plants and trees, and the insects and bird species.  Perralt has a rich biosphere and he’s been learning, almost without noticing it, about the native fauna and flora he sees each day on his designated therapeutic walk.  All of them feeding on each other, the plants on the sunlight, the creatures on the plants and one other, all the little circles and weavings of life, all just steadily going on.  Nothing so conscious as hope, yet utterly hopeful, to see and feel around him.

It has been a month since the last time a droid was detailed to escort him.

Jyn holds his hand.  He tells her about the birds, the insects, and the sun shines down on her face as she listens.  Her eyes crease at the corners; very gently, she smiles, squeezing his hand between hers.  He’s missed her so much.  She comes each day for a week, and when her leave of absence is finished she begins to write to him. 

He was not allowed messages, before.  Now they feed something in him that has lain stifled for so many months.  He reads her news, her natter of inconsequential things; some random doing of Bodhi’s, some joke going round Spec Forces about military-grade alcohol and General Rieekan’s boots, bits of gossip from the base, who’s quarrelled with who, who’s made up, who’s having a baby or leaving to start a new life farming banthas on Borodor. 

Jyn was never a gossip or a chatterer; he feels her love in every frivolity she tells him, every trivial detail, in knowing the work it must cost her to write like this. 

It is more than just rebellions that are built on hope.  So is living through change.  So is recovery.  So is love.

Simply, there is hope that he will go on living, hope that life will be worth having.  Simply, he is still alive.  The sun rises, and is beautiful, and is not death, only light.


End file.
